We highlight some notable benefits of CircleLytics below via a variety of solutions and share some sample questions for each. With these example questions you should bear in mind that in the second round everyone learns from each other’s different perspectives. Their subsequent validation (scoring up / down), and textual enrichment with a recommendation or an action or something else you ask about, truly emerges novelty. It’s like an online workshop at any scale, within any time frame and for any topic. At your own convenient time and from anywhere.
Large-scale interventions
With CircleLytics, you can engage and challenge groups of even 100,000s of people. In hours to days. Preferably days, since reflection and learning require a night’s sleep. This allows you to grow large groups’ awareness of a situation, choices to be made (or already made), and many more challenges. You can challenge them to indicate which behavior, action or task they prefer or believe they can embrace and learn first, or the opposite: how to avoid other behavior, to achieve a set goal. Co-setting goals, by the way, is another good example for the impact CircleLytics can bring you. Because people learn from each other through the second round, you very efficiently raise the awareness of huge numbers of people, challenge the status quo of their thinking, and to stimulate new behavior. You can repeat this regularly, because the power of learning and change is in that repetition. By periodically asking new questions, you challenge them again, and again, and build on previous results. In addition, you can ask what is missing, what is already going well and explain adjusted goals of the organization and ask for tips for acceleration, et cetera. You can also go through the phases of change programs such as ADKAR, PDCA, etc. with large groups to structure the success of change, with the collective of the people, without the resistance to change you engaged in the past.
o How does our new working method currently influence your choices about […]?
o What do you need more in the coming weeks or months to realize […] better?
o What obstacles do you experience or do you observe with coworkers, that we, as an organization, have to deal with and why?
o Which of our core values do you find most difficult to apply in your work and why?
Research
CircleLytics is also used to conduct research. These can be internal researchers at government organizations, external agencies and (scientific) researchers. They can combine qualitative and qualitative research, at any scale and get more reliable results than with surveys, focus group interview. Discuss your research goals with us. When it comes to knowledge enhancement, (external) publications and other goals, CircleLytics may be offered to you at no cost.
You can set the most common closed-answer scales and enrich the question with an explicit open question. So don’t just add a text field and keep your fingers crossed for some lines, but extend the (closed) question, by asking via the open question section: “can you clarify this using a recent example”, or “what is your experience on which you base your choice?”, “can you motivate clearly why?”, et cetera. This will ensure that people think more deeply about your question, because you are looking for their explanation: closed scales are filled in more thoughtfully from the start. Because of the qualitative extension of your question, you can interpret their closed answers much much better and very detailed. Through the second round respondents validate each other’s open answers, so you know what the most important but also the most rejected answers are: with validation, you know which answers are more important or less. Finally, you can design your questions so, that they can fill in their closed scale again: 60% of participants change their closed answer they gave in the first round. This means you can finally conduct qualitative research at any scale with high reliability and vetted answers, which is more valuable than focus groups and interviews, and obviously more valuable than surveys. Internal research agencies, educational institutes and external researchers use CircleLytics for these purposes.
o To what extent do you (dis)agree with […] and what is your main reason? In the second round, you may give your score again after you have been able to read and appreciate other people’s reasons.
o Which development in the next five years will have the most effect on […] and what is your source or substantiation for this?
o Score the following statement and explain what your reason, feeling or thought is?
o Which of the six developments mentioned below will most determine […] in the coming 12 months and can you motivate this?
Dialogue
Organizations want to seek, restore and/or strengthen their trust and connection with people. Moreover, they want to connect people with each other as well, and them with the development of the organization itself and its developments. Exactly the power of CircleLytics! Organizations are often too large and/or people are spread over several locations, departments, and encounter organizational hierarchy. This means that it is not possible to come together, let alone on a regular basis, and be truly in dialogue with each other: learn from each other by taking time to reflect, change one’s mind, and let unique insights emerge. Dialogue is a structured method to change your and everyone’s opinion, by learning from others who think differently. Our AI drives this diversity of thoughts by making sure that participants encounter opinions from others that think differently. Dialogue thrives on and requires anonymity but also the chance to allow people to reflect. You don’t enforce that in an online hour or workshop or meeting, let alone a so-called town hall where basically interaction is sacrificed. Moreover, the normal survey technology (single round only) has fallen out of favor for several reasons: nothing is done with it, too many generic questions, no validation round, hence you simply lack reliability and representativeness. So, let’s get in dialogue, say our customers’ leadership. Our library contains well over 1,000 deliberate open questions for you and in fact the second round always realizes the dialogue. Our soon to be released IQDesign (InstantQuestionDesign) will deliver a unique power to generate specific open questions for your purposes and dialogues.
o What is your thought about […] and do you have an example of this?
o What can a breakthrough mean for […] and what is decisive?
o What increases the chance for you to stay with us for a long time?
o What is it that negatively affects your trust in our organization (sometimes or often)?
Stakeholder dialogue
Steering groups, sounding boards, coalitions, intervention teams, crisis teams, and all kinds of other occasional or structured teams and forms of collaboration often have to deal with various stakeholders with many interests. Workshops and meetings (video or physical) have significant limitations, which are becoming more exposed with CircleLytics. Meetings are often too small in size, not diverse enough, and are hampered by the limited time available, and phenomena such as groupthink (agreeing with each other too quickly), confirmative bias (looking for confirmation of one’s own rightness), and cognitive dissonance (ignoring information that contradicts your perspective). Individual individuals can dominate meetings, hence the agenda and decisions, take up a lot of others’ time and space, and time for listening to, and reflecting on each other is hampered by the ticking clock. CircleLytics is thé easy-to-use working method in which you present stakeholders with propositions, dilemmas, choices, decisions to be taken and other issues, on which they reflect anonymously; subsequently they reflect on what others say and think differently, learn from this and collectively emerge joint points of view and solutions. This way you can prepare or shorten meetings, or even prevent them in the first place this way. Example questions:
o What are you willing to do for bottleneck […] as a partner of this collaboration to accelerate […]?
o How do we increase the visibility of […] of our coalition towards […]?
o How do we organize smarter that […] to ensure more […]?
o We are financially out of step with […]. How do we change this?
Meeting & gatherings
People don’t like meetings. Neither do organizations. Meetings (synchronous, ie. the simultaneous gathering of people) take time, hinder introverts, give disproportionately more space to extraverts, and have other limitations that negatively affect the quality of decision-making. Small groups seem efficient, but larger, asynchronous collaboration is safer, more inclusive, more insightful and more reliable in terms of outcomes and decision making. A larger group processes more information in a better way, asynchronously, and is more attractive to people and lowers individuals’ workload. With CircleLytics Dialogue you can prepare meeting, make choices, retrieve topics that are hidden below the surface, make taboos visible and discussable, et cetera. Such two-round dialogues make participants think, reflect on each other, and make them more involved. You save a huge amount of time, hence people’s well-being, and gain speed and quality in preparation for a subsequent (physical / video) meeting. Another advantage of our dialogues, is that you yourself have to really think hard about the essence, design thought-provoking questions to structure people’s think or spark their curiosity. This also prepares yóu well, not only them. Applying CircleLytics Dialogues for your meeting purposes, allows you to reduce, shorten or even replace meetings. Think about questions like:
o Can you already think about the following four dilemmas, the first of which is […] and tell us what choice you’d make and why?
o We want to make the following decisions and prepare together now. The first is […]. What do you think determines the success of this?
o A meeting is scheduled for Wednesday with a packed agenda. We already want to discuss two topics in this online dialogue. The first is […] and our question is what do you think is the best team to work this out?
o What is essential to take the decisions this week about […] and why?
Cross-silo learning
Organizations find it difficult to let people learn from people who think differently across the boundaries of their team, tribe or group. Certainly difficult if they work in separate locations and departments, from home, at the office, and so on. Research shows that people are biased to seek out like-minded people and, as a result, perform less well in the long run than if you were to seek out those who think differently. CircleLytics is applied to tackle problems, that require and benefit from cross-silo, collaborative, and adaptive learning. Or vice versa: groups that need cross-silo thinking, learning and collaborating and need support and repeated support in this. We measure for you what happens in that second round, with our algorithms ensuring that everyone gets to see as many different perspectives, cross-any-silo, and answers from others as possible. We show you with the Cross-Silo Collaboration Effect that, on average, 80% of the participants explicitly support contributions from people from other groups, teams, departments, functions, ages, gender, etc, etc. Just a few example questions:
o We want to halve the time it takes to get from idea to customer. After all, we all experience that we find it too slow and that it is unnecessary. Can you think about what could be the cause of this?
o What is a (if necessary) radical step to get from idea to product in weeks instead of months?
o What makes the difference to better balance well-being and high work pressure?
o What is a winning example of collaboration between our departments that you think should be repeatable for other projects and initiatives?
Co-creation
Collectively, groups are more creative. They can easily be 30-60% more creative than small groups. Research shows however that managers limit creativity to 20 ideas, though towards 100s or 1,000s of ideas generates better results. The risk with small groups for co-creation is that you don’t know in advance who will actually think differently in the creative process and you miss out on ideas from others than your small group. You don’t know, when you’re composing your small group, who are the people that might be your main contributors, influencers or a combination of that. That only becomes apparent because of and during the co-creation, so you don’t know that in advance. So best is to not base yourself on assumptions that you ‘bring together a diverse group’, such as your team, because this seemed to be working till now: your present issue is unique: creativity can come from unusual suspects and at unexpected times, triggered by the unexpected. You don’t want to risk limiting your creative process by only physical or online meetings with limited groups that have to co-create, reflect, learn at the same time, or even in the same room. CircleLytics allows you to organize your co-creation asynchronously, whether or not combined with meetings with (smaller) groups and ensures that you can easily repeat this with different iterations, and any group size. You can of course also co-create with external (large) or mixed groups of people. These types of co-creations make people involved, committed and allows you to learn from and move faster forward with their creative, collaborative results. Think about questions like:
o Which aspect of our services could be 10x better than now? How?
o What can or should be done radically differently to achieve that […] and why do you see it that way?
o What idea or idea of this do you get from conversations with customers or other sources?
o What is the smartest, next step to make the change process […] successful? How?
Predictions
Collective intelligence research (Bothos, 2009; Barberis Canonico 2019) shows that large groups of people make better predictions than a researcher, expert group or hired consultant. Diversity is one of those conditions, and large numbers of people who have as much interest as possible in a good forecast, such as employees for their own organization and markets. CircleLytics allows you to make predictions easily, more accurate and independently, without the vulnerability and limitation of focus groups or a (hired) expert. Although the combination, and your consultant applying CircleLytics, is often a recipe for good results. Many people, each of whom can have unique information, and bring it together to achieve something that no one can do individually. Consider questions such as:
o How do you see the growth of our market for […] over the next 5-10 years and why?
o What % of employees do you expect to leave in the next three years, why?
o What will our customer do or want differently because of the offer to […]. Explain!
o Which of our current products […] has the least chance of existing in 10 years?
Training, Study Days & Coaching
If you train groups or coach people, you want them to work consciously, thoughtfully, reflectively and with initiative. Participants can receive online assignments in advance via CircleLytics and can see other participants’ contributions. This way, you introduce peer learning in an early stage of the training program, without any log-in activity: just via a unique link. You ask them through the second round how other contributions inspire you, what you learn from them, if you agree, and how it influences your preparation, or for example your objectives for the next training or coaching meeting. You can also evaluate these kinds of meetings: for example, one week later, six weeks later and three months later. This way, you avoid scrap learning: the loss of learning & development efforts, caused by the lack of people applying it effectively and regularly (basically, forgetting about it). It’s a shocking 60-80% so, structuring the success of training efforts will pay off. Just a few questions to show you how to engage your students:
o What did you learn the most, which is also applicable in your current work?
o What do you still find difficult and why and would you like more help with?
o What is your goal for the next time we meet and why that goal?
o How does what you have learned so far inspire you in your choices for the years to come?
Scenario analysis
Uncertainty requires forecasting, remaining agile, collectively urging all employees and systems to receive (early) signals in a timely manner and to be responsive, based on scenarios. Scenario planning makes sure you’re prepared as well enough for signals that trigger an response (response program, scenario, cluster of actions). If you have to make long-term investments, this affects your agility and therefore your adaptive capacity. This while your market can be very changeable and requires a high adaptive capacity. Then it is good to consider a sufficient set of options based on different scenarios of the (near) future, while at the same time not blindly executing on those scenarios: collective intelligence not only helps you build scenarios, but also monitors early warning signals that trigger one scenario or the other, and regularly update your scenarios. Collective intelligence helps leadership and decision makers to process large, specific amounts of information and design scenarios about the future. This also ensures that employees experience that they are part of that future, are trusted, and the brain is enabled not to take a negative view of it, ie. be open to uncertainty. So, you increase collective consciousness and responsiveness of your people, hence, your organization. Questions you can ask are:
o What is the most unthinkable thing that could happen to our market […] in the next ten years and what is your feeling, image, association or otherwise about this?
o Suppose that politicians radically change the regulations re […], what do you think they will do and we should have as response?
o What have you been very wrong about in the past five to ten years, about where the market would be now? What did you overlook?
o Which specific geopolitical development will impact our purpose? How?
Behaviour
Asking open-ended questions challenges the status quo of one’s thinking, thereby influencing one’s subsequent actions. Seen in this way, asking open questions is an intervention on behavior. With CircleLytics, you can do this at any scale, and repeat it, with many parallel groups with each of them a specific intervention. By using regular interventions with CircleLytics you can identify and discourage unacceptable or undesired behaviour, and you can elicit, stimulate and further reinforce (align) desired behaviour. The power is in repetition. Moreover, through the second round you can make the group aware and ask what they recognize from others, and what recommendations they have to prevent something or, conversely, to reinforce something. Via your dashboard, you monitor progress, differences between one and the other intervention, etc. Just as an example, here’s a handful of questions to think of. Remember, that the multistep process enables collaborative learning and reflection.
o What behavior of colleagues do you see other colleagues struggling with or even having problems with?
o How do you think we should work together differently to make the implementation of […] a success?
o What does the customer appreciate most about how we treat him/her? Why is that do you think?
o What kind of behaviour do we pay little attention to, but could be harmful to you, others, and/or our customers and therefore our organization in the long run?
Brainstorm
A good brainstorm is about generating many, diverse ideas. Research mentions 2,000 ideas to be a lot better than the regular handful of 20. A condition for this diversity is that participants can think anonymously, independently, come up with ideas, and do so at their own time. ‘Infecting’ each other with each other’s ideas at a too early stage influences and limits diversity, hence creativity. CircleLytics is used, whether or not in combination with prep meetings, to hold ascynchronous, anonymous brainstorms, without limits in terms of participants, clock pressure nor other limiting influences. You can also generate ideas in a small context and then test the ideas in a (very) large context and group via CircleLytics: which ideas receive what degree of support or rejection and why and what are the subsequent steps mentioned? You can also work out the most supported ideas very efficiently individually with (large) groups to arrive at a demarcation, a value proposition, necessary actions, etc., or even develop a complete business model canvas. This is based on collective intelligence. You may generate additional initial ideas via LLMs such as ChatGPT.
Questions can be (many other questions imaginable and available):
o Which rules do you think could be deleted or revised?
o What are the strangest, most unimaginable, incomprehensible, or other, reasons customers don’t want to tell us for switching from us to a competitor?
o Which idea is valuable to our customer but not easy to copy for our competitor?
o How do we save 10% on our costs, so € ……, before the end of the year, in a way that the customer does not notice?
Risk analysis
Collective intelligence exposes risks that you otherwise don’t identify until they manifest. Risks arise, for example, from behaviors that gradually become patterns and become intertwined with normal activities. Identifying them is extremely difficult, but collectively they can be identified more quickly. People and organizations have a tendency to base their decisions, activities and behaviours on assumptions, patterns and other points of references. Testing the status quo of various items, in a way that prevents groupthink, is a recurring responsibility of decision makers, change managers and others. Groups that are asked asynchronously and anonymously for evaluations, risk analyses, identification of problems, etc. are better able to expose these, and develop actions that control, prevent or reduce risks. In addition, each CircleLytics deployment demonstrates what the group as a collective does not support or sees risky through the dismissive, negative scores they are allowed to assign to the contributions of others. With every dialogue you can therefore immediately see where the downside risk is for your issue and people, and possible resistance you may have to contend with. Remember that people’s resistance is a sign of ignoring the signals that precede resistance. Risks can come from many sources, angles, systems, triggers, and their variety, dynamics and changing character can be addressed by the CircleLytics technology; it ignites, collects, aggregates and lets people validate what’s worth paying attention to, and what’s not. Some sample questions here:
o Which rule do you sometimes break in order to achieve your (commercial) goals?
o What risk do you experience for the quality of your work with the (significantly) increased workload?
o Is there something you do or don’t do that could potentially have a very negative effect on your wellbeing in the years to come?
o What do you sometimes observe that you think is not happening according to the rules?
Would you like to speak further and exchange thoughts about one or more of the above? Or to discuss your unique challenges? We have numerous cases and applications to inspire you what the power of asynchronous (non-simultaneous) collaboration and collective intelligence can mean for your people, organization ánd challenges.
You can schedule something here, for on location or via video. We’re looking forward to it!
